…but it is this uniquely braindead opinion article from yesterday’s Spectator. Through an embarrassing mix of ill-informed armchair punditry and borderline religious bigotry, Adam Sieff proves that there is a path back to power for the GOP–namely people like Adam Sieff, whose post-electoral complacency is astonishing.

In his column, Sieff assessed Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s chances at winning the youth vote during his all-but-certain presidential run in 2012. Sieff concedes that Jindal holds some promise for the party:

On the surface, Jindal is an impressive figure for the Republican party: a young, Ivy League-educated Washington outsider with charisma, a very fiscally conservative voting record, and experience with health care policy.

He also cleaned up the mess left by his corrupt and incompetent Democratic predecessor–but no matter. Any of the author’s omissions pale in comparison to the one that our prospective candidate is almost sure to commit. He is–gasp–a Catholic. More disgustingly, he’s a practicing one. And according to Sieff, he’s going to hide this terrifying fact from America’s youth.

Read after the jump, and shudder at that prospect that you share a classroom with this guy:

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There’s a war on in America.

It’s a cultural war on queer people. Most recently this has manifested itself as the votes against same-sex marriage in California, Florida, and Arizona and the ban on gay adoption in Arkansas. But to truly understand the marginalization of the queer community has experienced in this country, we must remember that this started a long time ago.

In 1993, the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell became officially military policy, ushered in by President Bill Clinton, who had promised to work on behalf of gay rights. In 1995, in Bottoms v. Bottoms, a Virginia court ignored the parental rights of a lesbian mother and instead gave custody to the child’s grandmother. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted, and signed by President Bill Clinton. In 1998 Matthew Sheppard was murdered for being gay (LGBT people, today, have yet to be included in hate crime legislation). As I wrote in a previous article:

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Doing a take-home exam at 3:40 on the morning its due sure sucks, but looking up Facebook groups for potential 2012 presidential nominees sure doesn’t! A quick, time-killing rundown:

Romney: 4,352 members

Palin: 2,002

Jindal: 931

Huckabee: 706

And then it drops off significantly:

Pawlenty: 36

David Petraeus: 28

McCain: 24 (yeah go ahead, waste your Facebook vote…)

Jeff Flake: 10

Michael Steele: 6

Tom Ridge: 5

Condoleeza Rice: 3

Dick Cheney: 1

Mike Pence: 6 (for veep)

Charlie Crist, Mike Pence, Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback, Eric Cantor: No support

And there you have it. Just over a thousand or so days until Iowa…

[A brief culling of gut-reactions from Comm. contributors. See Noah Baron's post below for more perspective on yesterday's events.]

CHRISTOPHER M. LENT:

The best argument against religion is its adherents; the best argument against Obama was his supporters; which of the theists or the Obama-glorifiers were more insistent and less ironic in their doxologies is open to debate. Suffice it to say that 150 of my friends changed their Facebook pictures over the last day; the images range from a black fist upraised against a red background to a headshot of the candidate cracking a bottle of valedictory champagne; evidently idolatry isn’t taboo to the Cult of Barack Hussein Obama, innuendos from Bill O’Reilly and Hillary Clinton aside.  Despite the dangerous blind fervor inspired and adhered to by Obama, people like me voted for him because he was, in a sense, the opposite of religion; the notion of ‘objective truth,’ which Orwell lamented as rapidly disappearing from the world in his time - it’s still around, but the last eight years have not been good - favored his positions. Even as his campaign grew more cultish and more revolting to this kind of supporter, harkening back to those vapid nostrums that propelled him to premature stardom in 2004, rational discourse supported him, even if he didn’t support rational discourse.  I think of myself as one of the few people who voted for Obama in spite of, not because of, his demagoguery and his charisma; but everyone should ‘hope’ along with me that my conception of Obama, not that of his most rabid supporters, cheering on the subway from Williamsburg to Harlem like children at the North Korean mass games, is the right one for the next four years.

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Last night, when I found out Barack Obama had won, I was ecstatic. I ran out of my dorm with my friends and we, and probably 200 other Columbia students, marched up to Harlem to watch the last few minutes of Obama’s speech.

But when I got back to my computer and television, I was horribly disappointed. The ban on gay marriage in Florida had passed, the ban on gay marriage in Arizona had passed, the ban on gay marriage in California had passed, and the ban on gay adoption in Arkansas had passed. Al Franken looked like he was going to lose to Norm Coleman, and convicted felon Ted Stevens was ahead by three points in Alaska (my friend has vowed to start donating to the Alaskan Independence Party so that incubator of corrupt and incompetant politicians will leave us alone and take their two corrupt Republican senators with them).

I know I should be happy. My friends keep telling me that Barack Obama will be good for gay people. And “at least it’s not McCain”. And yet, for the past eight years — for nearly half of my lifetime — my countrymen have been voting to stop me from having equal rights.

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For about a day and a half I was convinced I’d be voting Obama. This short-lived epiphany came when I was watching cable news coverage of the first House vote on the bailout package–”wow,” I thought as I saw one clueless Republican after another cave to backwoods populism and vote the economy into an even more precipitous freefall. “Damned if this won’t be the last time I see the GOP fuck up something this badly.” Watching congressional Republicans torpedo their own party leader’s plan for solving a problem that that party had ostensibly created was just farcical enough to seal it for me. I’d become a reluctant Obama convert.

It took only a couple of days for this reasoning to come crashing down. Incomprehensible even to some of the top economists on earth, the financial crisis is the sort of event that can plausibly be blamed on just about anything. Protectionists can blame it on our abysmal balance of trade, neo-liberals can blame it on Chinese market manipulation, conservatives can blame it on government interference in the housing market, moderates can blame it on Regan-era deregulation, liberals can blame it on Clinton-era deregulation, historians can blame it on the political and economic forces that gave birth to the modern-day investment bank (the kind that invests about $20 for every $1 of actual capital), wonks can blame it on Paulson’s refusal to bail out Lehman Brothers, econ profs can blame it on the development of a $76 trillion international trade in credit default swaps that emerged as a way of artificially circumventing risk in the credit market. With some basis, an econ major friend of mine blames the crisis on overzealous small-town bankers grubbing for commissions on loans that they knew would never be repaid. So much for Wall St.’s supposed victimization of Main St., huh? 

I soon began thinking about why I’d had such a pro-Obama gut reaction. I realized it was born from a deep, psychological craving for the uncontaminated–from the need to coalesce around whatever seems the most distant from the crisis itself. But nothing is more socially and politically dangerous–never mind intellectually weaker–than desiring catharsis or even discontinuity for its own sake, especially without taking a good, long look at exactly what kind of catharsis or discontinuity we’d be in for. In a crisis, your gut tells you that crises are bad and that change is good. But we owe ourselves a look at where this craving for catharsis could lead us.

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[With election day getting closer by the second, Noah Baron looks at America's sham of a democratic system. Especially worth a read for whatever green-voting New Jersyites happen to read this blog...]

I decided to come home this weekend to spend some time with my family, see some friends from home, and vote. When I arrived last night, I saw my sample ballot waiting for me. I eagerly opened it up, but only to be disappointed.

This election day, I intended, with the exception of President and Congress (my congressman is pretty awesome), to vote a straight Green Party ticket. But I ran into a problem. The only Green candidate running was Cynthia McKinney, for President. For Sheriff and Board of Chosen Freeholders, the only candidates were Democrats and Republicans. In fact, for one of the Freeholder races (there are three), the Republicans didn’t even run a candidate.

I found this all profoundly disturbing, but I was not to be deterred. This morning, I began research the various candidates, starting with those for US Senate.

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[More on the world's most famous plumber--other than Mario, obviously]

Eli recently claimed in a post that Joe the Plumber “can’t do any more damage than the rest of [Congress]” if he ran and were elected. Unfortunately, this isn’t true at all, and for a variety of reasons. First, because he is a conservative wingnut, and second because he’s woefully ill-informed when it comes to American politics. The two are probably related, but I won’t go there in this post.

If you’re a regular watcher of the Daily Show, you’ll have noted that the renowned “Joe the Plumber” has made the following the statements: “social security’s a joke”, “I wish our borders were closed”, and “because you’re successful you have to pay more than everyone else?” One could logically conclude from these statements that he wants to abolish social security (I thought Hoover was dead?), end all immigration to the US (this is pretty right-wing, even for the Republican Party, for, while maintaining an aversion to Mexicans and poor brown people generally, they don’t seem to mind rich Canadians), and instituting the ridiculous flat-tax. This pretty much encapsulates Mike Huckabee’s platform (except ending immigration was too far to the right, even for Mr. Let’s-get-rid-of-the-IRS). He also recently snubbed John McCain to pal around with be interviewed by the guy who wanted to quarantine everyone who has HIV or AIDS.

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There’s a lot that’s questionable in the Spec’s presidential endorsement–hasn’t the 95% number been semi-debunked by now? And hasn’t McCain’s domestic policy been more or less organized around “pushing programs to the backburner?” No matter. The Spec made an admirable attempt at looking at the election in terms of higher education issues. It failed because it ignored the single most important higher-ed issue of all: Obama’s plan to nationalize the student loan industry.

As I wrote yesterday, it’s flabbergasting that no one’s picked up on this yet, and disheartening that no major commentators or analysts have weighed the pros and cons of getting rid of the guaranteed loan program. While there are few valid arguments for scrapping all federal subsidies for private lenders, I personally reel at the prospect of the government shouldering $85 billion worth of new debt, just as I reel at the interventionist mindset that Obama’s loan policy reflects. Even if the chances of him implementing an across-the-board government loan program are slim, the very idea indicates a certain philosophy on educational equity that’s gone  uncriticized and unexamined, even a week before most Americans go to the tolls. Farbeit for the Spec E-board to criticize or examine it–’cuz we really are beyond being able to give an even vaguely even-handed look at Obama’s policies by this point, aren’t we?

On the page today, Olivia Rosane chides John McCain for what little he has to say about student loan reform:

In addition, McCain only addresses the issue of college loans by vowing to make sure they are accessible. With two-thirds of students graduating in debt, accessibility to college loans isn’t the issue.

This is a legitimate point, although Rosane only alludes to why: one of the causes of the current financial mess was the absurd accessibility of loans that people simply couldn’t pay back. But because the economy depends so much upon a functioning private credit system, accessibility has to be tempered by certain internal and external checks against rampant, even irrational lending: checks like market regulation, sensible interest rates, consumer restraint, saving, etc. Accessibility is a great idea, but with micro-level financial decision-making resulting in macro-level chaos, the question is what kind of accessibility we actually want.

McCain hasn’t really addressed this yet. Indeed, his stance on the subsidized, “guaranteed” student loan system is all but unknown a little over a week before the election. But we know Obama’s position. And it is worrisome indeed.

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